Biblical Rhetoric of Separatism and Universalism and Its Intolerant Consequences

James W Watts

doi:10.3390/rel11040176

Abstract

The long history of the Jewish and Christian use of separatist rhetoric and universal ideals reveals their negative consequences. The Hebrew Bible’s rhetoric about Israel as a people separated from the Egyptians and Canaanites is connected to Israel’s purity practices in Leviticus 18 and 20. Later communities wielding greater political power, however, employed this same anti-Canaanite pollution rhetoric in their efforts to colonize many different parts of the world. Separatist rhetoric was used to protect small Jewish communities in the early Second Temple period. The Christian New Testament rejected many of these purity practices in order to makes its mission more inclusive and universal. However, its denigration of concerns for purification as typically “Jewish” fueled intolerance of Jews in the form of Christian anti-Semitism. The violent history of both separatist and universalist rhetoric provides a cautionary tale about the consequences of using cultural and religious comparisons for community formation.

Highlights

Most of the articles in this special issue on religious conflicts and coexistence focus on contemporary religious communities or relatively recent history
Though religious universalists tend to depict separatism as the opposite of their universalism to distinguish themselves from other religious groups, that claim has obscured the use of separatism by their own traditions, as well as the universalistic tendencies of the religious traditions that they oppose
Separatism and universalism have been frequently cited by one religious tradition, Christianity, to distinguish itself from another, Judaism, but the history surveyed here shows that this distinction and the values attributed to it do not hold

Summary

Introduction

Most of the articles in this special issue on religious conflicts and coexistence focus on contemporary religious communities or relatively recent history. Though religious universalists tend to depict separatism as the opposite of their universalism to distinguish themselves from other religious groups, that claim has obscured the use of separatism by their own traditions, as well as the universalistic tendencies of the religious traditions that they oppose This history has been told many times before, and in much more detail than I can provide here. Separatism and universalism have been frequently cited by one religious tradition, Christianity, to distinguish itself from another, Judaism, but the history surveyed here shows that this distinction and the values attributed to it do not hold. Despite their apparent opposition, both separatist and universalist elements in biblical texts have frequently been used by the same religious groups to attack and oppress others. Eschatological universalism, the belief that everybody will be saved, is not under discussion in this article

Biblical Separatist Rhetoric

Uses of Biblical Separatist Rhetoric in the Americas

Uses of Biblical Separatist Rhetoric Elsewhere

Separatism and Universalism in Ancient Judaism

Intolerant Christian Universalism

The Ambiguous Heritage of Separatist and Universal Rhetoric